Coda

As we draw this short book to a close, we are not in the same place where we started, and yet the journey is not finished. The bio, the human, and race all remain unsettled objects of analysis, and indeed we hope that these concepts feel more open-ended than they did when we began, rather than more closed down.

Recall that we opened with Anna Tsing’s injunction to “look around” rather than ahead,1 and that still holds even after having looked through four turns of the kaleidoscope that has refracted the racial cage. In each of the chapters, we have asked how we might do difference differently. We have questioned how looking at difference through a biohumanities lens might shift the boundaries between the human and more than human. If biohumanities—as we’ve seen unfold through these chapters—takes a (posthuman) humanities approach to question what we mean by the “human” as a based point, it might enable us to consider how the very idea of the human and human-centered social and cultural life contours biological life, and how this is racialized. In relation to these ideas, we have looked around on multiple levels, drawing on sources in the history of science and contemporary media and policy reports, as well as philosophy and poetry. By engaging in a work-in-progress biohumanities approach that has taken neither the bio not the human for granted, our curiosity has been piqued rather than satisfied by this process.

Holding onto this open-endedness in our inquiry into race is an essential aspect of the contestation of the carcerality of race. As we continue to confront new cagings, we will also be on the lookout for new dismantlings.